Reince Priebus is supposed to tell the world on Monday specifically how he will repair a GOP digital operation that last year Democrats made look like a relic of the dial-up era.

Yet in late-February meetings with tech industry gurus on the West Coast, the Republican National Committee chairman still appeared genuinely torn, sources present told POLITICO. Priebus, they said, complained about not knowing whom to trust amid a barrage of conflicting advice about how to fix one of the party’s most vexing deficiencies.

And those issues are likely to trouble the GOP for some time, if the forthcoming plan of action in an RNC preview distributed Tuesday is any indication. The outline looks to some like a version of similar vague rhetoric that several GOP strategists — all of whom were involved in high-profile 2012 campaigns — told POLITICO they’ve heard before.

The most specific promise, for instance, is to hire a digital director — dubbed a “chief technology officer” — who will be well-funded and empowered to be bold and innovative. That is regarded by many with cautious optimism, a hope that the party really means it this time, tempered by a sense of déjà vu. The RNC is regarding such a hire as an important new idea, but Republican strategists have been clamoring for it since Election Day and believe someone should already be in place.

“It’s almost like their quote is the same quote as before they hired Todd Herman and Cyrus Krohn,” said Vince Harris, newly hired digital director for the reelection campaign of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), referring to prior RNC tech figureheads. “My worry with the whole thing is that the RNC is looking at photo ops and flashy hires and sound bites, throwing out data and that at the end of the day that it’s hard to really change the culture of a sitting institution. And that’s what needs to be done.”

The sentiment was echoed by another prominent Republican digital expert, who asked not to be named because of working ties to the RNC. “Meet the old boss, same as the new boss,” the strategist said. “Every two years they have this new great person who’s going to change it. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

RNC chief of staff Mike Shields, hired just three weeks ago, vowed it’ll be different this time. The committee’s summary of Priebus’s plan offers the promise “to fundamentally change the role of digital, technology and data at the party committee level.” There are promises of training programs and new get-out-the-vote tools, all of which heartened campaign consultants.

“That’s what made me excited to come here, when I understood that Chairman Priebus has this absolute commitment to go down that road,” Shields told POLITICO. “We’re in a job search right now, talking to a lot of people, bringing a lot of other friends in to get some advice on who that person should be. I wish I could make [the hire] yesterday.”

Yet even by Shields’s admission little is likely to start until the hire of a chief technology officer, a task the report anticipates being completed by May 1. While RNC brass promise to look far beyond the Beltway or even the political world to find that person, it’s unclear how that position is any different, except in title, from the job now held by RNC Digital Director Tyler Brown.

Since November’s presidential drubbing, blamed partly on inept voter data technology, Priebus and other RNC brass have repeatedly told digital campaign strategists that fixing that imbalance is a top priority. The Democrats’ superior technology allowed President Barack Obama’s campaign to target and get voters to the polls with pinpoint precision, while the Romney campaign was largely in the dark about who would vote and how.

That said, many worry that the RNC’s lengthy, indecisive assessment continues to leave Republicans stuck in place even as the next campaign cycle is fast approaching. The concern is that Monday’s report is the beginning of the beginning and won’t substantively bear fruit for many months if not years.

May 1 “will have been half a year, and my concern is if it takes half a year to hire someone, how long is it going to take to change a culture and invest money and get things operational?” Harris said. “People are wandering around in the desert, to quote a Biblical metaphor here, and they need someone to lead them.”

At meetings during his West Coast swing, according to those present, Priebus confided that he is besieged by so many vendors flinging so many panaceas at him at a time when he is wary of making a big, expensive mistake.

Priebus was not made available to comment by the RNC.

“The circular firing squad of vendors … they’re all sort of attacking the Romney campaign and attacking each other for not being advanced enough. The irony is they all lost primaries to the Romney campaign and they’ve been the ones guiding campaigns on digital for multiple cycles, ultimately profiting from the lack of accountability into what they are doing for their clients,” said one GOP digital staffer who asked not to be named because he works closely with the RNC. “Right now, everyone’s pitching themselves as a solution.”

Still, it is Priebus’s job to work it out, and time is of the essence given that campaign staffs are already beginning to congeal for the coming cycle.

“For something to move fast, you have to have somebody at the top who’s willing to cut through a lot of red tape regardless or you get bogged down,” said Ned Ryun, founder of the conservative nonprofit American Majority, who does work for the campaign tech firm Political Gravity. “If Reince Priebus decides that this is an absolute this-will-happen-tomorrow, he can make it happen. So really, it’s going to be a question of what does Reince really want.”

Some Republican digital types said the RNC could make up ground with Democrats this cycle if its organizational changes are matched by action.

“Execution is all that will matter in the end, but I give them credit for starting with this,” Patrick Ruffini, the RNC’s digital head from 2005 to 2007 and founder of the GOP digital consultancy Engage LLC. “A heavy focus on technology needs to be complemented by a focus on people and developing talent to staff a true digital campaign that reaches into every field office and precinct in 2014 and 2016.”

Topping the wish list of GOP digital functionaries is that the GOP create a user-friendly central repository for voter information that is accessible, sophisticated and updated by campaigns on all levels in real time.

“If I had a magic wand and super PAC money, I’d be building a really solid, national voter file that is a common base for everyone, like the Dems have,” said Mark Harris, 2010 campaign manager for Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “We need someone to step up to the plate to go and do that. It’s a lot of money to build a national voter file. It’s millions of dollars. That requires a certain amount of gravitas.”

Democrats have just that in a system known as the Voter Action Network. Republicans have a voter information system called Data Trust that RNC officials have insisted is just as good, but that few major campaigns actually use.

“Data Trust isn’t pulling in all the information it needs to pull in to be useful,” said Wesley Donehue, a consultant working on digital strategy for the Republican parties in South Carolina, New Mexico, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “The Democrats put all their data from all their sources into one central place so you create both profiles of unique individual voters and targetable universes. They’ve figured out how to break down those walls and the Republicans haven’t.”

What’s more, Vince Harris said, Data Trust “does a poor job of communicating their existence to people like Wesley and myself.”

Priebus’s job, Harris and Donehue acknowledge, is unenviable. Filtering through the torrent of unsolicited ideas is rough for someone not steeped in technology.

The fear of many GOP digital managers is that the party is stuck with Data Trust either because of contracts or because of its deep roots with current and past party leaders. It was established as an independent company, but its CEO, Anne Hathaway, is a former RNC chief of staff and board members include three former RNC chairmen.

Publicists for Data Trust declined to comment and referred all questions for this report to the Republican Party.

As it becomes more apparent that drastic changes probably aren’t in store at the RNC in the near term, other GOP groups and entities are moving to fill the breach.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has hired a dozen digital staffers in recent months to prepare for the 2014 cycle. The Republican Governors Association, focused on high-profile off-year races in New Jersey and Virginia this year, is also building up its team. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign manager Mike DuHaime has held several meetings with conservative programmers in Silicon Valley about new election tools. Vince Harris held similar meetings at South by Southwest this past weekend.

“The state parties are hoping the RNC comes up with something and passes it down to the states, but they’re not banking on it,” Donehue said. “They’re looking at alternative methods for their states that maybe will be useful in the next presidential race. … I trust the RNC is going to get moving, but they’ve got a lot to do to catch up after six years of getting their asses kicked.”

The national party, Mark Harris said, is “positioned better than anyone to fix this problem. They’re engaging the right people and doing the right thing. All of us benefit from a stronger, more technologically adept RNC.”

Still, there is also some concern that Shields actually may be expecting too much from the new digital regime. Shields told POLITICO he believes if the party were on the same level as the Democrats and Obama’s team, “We could beat anybody.”

“What I don’t want to see is the party thinking but for a better voter file we would have won,” said a digital staffer who worked for the Romney campaign. “We might have done better, but there are other problems, because many of our policies are turnoffs to important voting blocks like Latinos. Tech can only do so much.”